Academic

The Radical Vision: Essays for the Seventies

By propertyprof

Fresh from my trip to Berkeley--and most interested in the history of that town, since I've now seen a bunch of the sites made famous during the 1960s--I pulled a reader off my shelf, The Radical Vision: Essays for the Seventies (edited by a couple of CUNY English profs, Leo Hamalian and Frederick R. Karl).  Yeah--that's the title.  It was published in March 1970, while the 60s were still going on.  I guess the 1960s continued until McGovern's nomination in July 1972.  (Or I suppose you might extend it to January 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, but I think President Nixon's trouncing of McGovern in November 1972 marked the end of the 1960s.)  Looking back on this from the perspective of 2008, what a title for a book?!  "The Radical Vision: Essays for the Seventies."

I bought it a few years ago--before I moved here--at a used bookstore on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, when I was in town for a conference.  Why?  Well, I'm always interested in radical literature of the left and right and it seemed like it would make a nice addition to my collection of old documents.  (Right up on the shelf with Oliver Wendell Holmes' 1850 phi beta kappa poem to Yale (that's OWH senior)).  What really sold me was this: there's an essay by Harvard historian Donald Fleming in it!  There's nothing about Donald Fleming that says radical, so I was particularly interested in reading his contribution ("On Living in a Biological Revolution," which was reprinted from the Atlantic) and seeing how it fit with the rest of the essays.

As for the rest of the essays, they're radical all right.   There are some classics: Malcolm X's "The Black Revolution," Herbert Marcuse's "Liberation from the Affluent Society," Jerry Rubin's "A Yippie Manifesto."  Makes for some amusing reading.   I was particularly interested in the essay on the "people's park" in Berkeley by Sheldon Wolin and Dotson Rader's on Columbia.  The later because I spent a few years on that campus about two decades after the takeover.  Pretty interesting for a historian to see how quickly things change.  Two decades can work a complete revolution--or perhaps I should use a more "establishment" term, like makeover--in an institution. 

Anyway, professors come in for a lot of criticism in the volume.  What's Rubin say about us faculty?

I don't dig the "professor" b------t.    I am more interested in a 15-year-old stoned dope freak living on street corners than I am in a Ph.D.

There is anti-intellectualism in America because professors have created an artificial environment.  That is why the average working guy does not respect professors. ...

You can't learn anything in school.  Spend one hour in a jail or a courtroom and you will learn more than in five years in a university....

Graffiti in school bathrooms tells you more about what's on people's minds than all the books in the library.

Lots of stuff to think about there, particularly as I work on reconstructing the antebellum southern mind by looking at ... literary addresses.  At least some of my work looks to what happened in courtrooms.

I guess because I teach trusts and estates I'm at the core of the "establishment."  Anyway, I need to get back to preping for class tomorrow; we're in the midst of rule against perpetuities.  How hierarchical--to say nothing of artificial!

Maybe one of these days I'll get back to blogging about hippie jurisprudence (and here).

Alfred Brophy

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on September 21, 2008 (boomark / email).